You can buy stocks during market trading hours. You can also place Buy /Sell Orders even if the market is close for trading. This is called Off-Hours Order, or O-H Order. The execution of the order though will be process the following trading day.

O-H Order is useful if you really want to buy a certain stock ‘at the open’ (ATO) or ‘at the close’ (ATC) prices. This is also useful for busy investors since you can conveniently create a buy order at night.

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Off-hours order can be done via COL stock market trading portal; I don’t know if this is also possible with BPI Investment platform. If you are stock trading with BPI, please let us know if this is possible too.

ACTUAL O-H ORDER PLACEMENT

I’ve tried O-H Order last week in buying AP stocks, or stocks of the Aboitiz Power Corporation.

Let’s get to the guide on how to buy stocks when market is close, or Off-Hours Orders on COL trading portal.

Login to the COL trading portal at colfinancial.com

Access Trading >> O-H Order

Enter the stock code and the number of shares you want to buy. Choose whether you want your order sent to the Exchange at the open (ATO) or at the close (ATC).

If you don’t know the code of the stock you want to buy, click on Stock List as seen on the screenshot above. Browse until you find the company, copy their stock code.

The Board Lot serves as your guide in the number of shares you can buy. In our example which is AP stock, board lot is 100. Therefore, you can buy 100, 200, 1000, 2000, 3010 shares, etc as long as the number of stocks is divisible by the board lot, or multiples of it.

For ATO orders – Your order is valid at the trade opening time / price.

For ATC orders– Your order is valid at the trade closing time / price.

On the BID PRICE – you can use the last price transaction as your bid price, or check the ASK Price and choose one from the Ask list, or you can also just enter the price that you want. However, please note that this is a temporary price for an “O-H Buy Order ATO”, or the “O-H Buy Order ATC”

This temporary price is used for preliminary calculation only to determine more or less if you have the cash or shares to execute the transaction. The actual price that your order will have would be equivalent to the price of the stock during market opening if you’ve chosen ATO. Or it will be the price of stock during market run off if you have chosen ‘ATC’.

If you do not have sufficient funds to buy or stock position to sell, you will encounter error with your Off-hours order.

Confirm your O-H order by clicking “Preview Order”.

The Off-Hours Placement Preview Order will display on the next page. Check for accuracy.

At this point, you will now see the order charges; total fees for this particular O-H Buy Order is P23.06:

You can find the details of your pending O-H order by clicking TRADING >> VIEW / MODIFY ORDER.

If you wish to cancel, click the CANCEL button before pre-opening market hours the following trading day.

This particular order is for AP stock, bid price at P44.40 (temporary), type is ATO or “At The Open”.

When the market opened the following day, I got confirmation of the successful buy order for AP stock, price was at P44.30 which is the opening price when my O-H order was executed, not the temporary P44.40 bid price I’ve set the night before.

***I tried OH Buy order again for Double Dragon DD stock. My OH order then was at P54.80, it was not processed since the opening price was at P55.

I received this confirmation about successful O-H Buy Order on my email:

The average stock price is P44.5306. Check this post for an explanation on how you can compute for the average stock price.

What time can you placed an Off-Hours Buy / Sell order in COL Financial trading portal?

You can place after trade hours order from 6:01 PM to 8:54 AM of the following trading day (weekdays) and anytime during weekends.

COL Financial advisory: Off-hours buy orders will be collected on a first come first serve basis, and will be sent to the Exchange for posting on a first in first out basis during pre-open session.

Disclosure: iSensey does not receive any remuneration from COL Financial Group Inc. for any posts that discuss them or their services. iSensey is an account holder of COL and publishes which could be useful for other new investors to the stock market.